01-Mar-2014 A Question Of Balance

As songwriters and performers we – like many others – face the somewhat difficult task of balancing the writing, learning, performing and recording with the dreaded ‘P’ word… publicity. Even if you’re the best thing since sliced bread the world will not necessarily beat a path to your door. If you have, or are building, a good reputation for your songwriting and performing, it certainly won’t guarantee you fame or fortune or even a gig at at the ‘Slug and Ferret’.

Like many of our contemporaries we’ve been down the track of jumping on board the latest ‘next best thing’ for online networking and promotion. Does it work? Is there a good return on the amount of time and effort put into such activities. Here’s a list of some such sites we’ve looked at – some we’ve tried, some we still actively use, and others… well, let’s just say that they didn’t really do it. To head off any hint of relative importance we’ll make the list alphabetical:

AudioBoo

Bandcamp

Bandizmo

Facebook

Google+

MusoMap

MySpace

NuMuBu

Reverbnation

SoundCloud

StageIt

Twitter

uStream

VibeDeck

Vimeo

YouTube

Each of these sites requires setting up a profile, managing music and videos and photos, making ‘friends’, liking things, commenting, adding events, posting status updates, etc, etc, etc, yawn, yawn… and to what end? Another good question – and no, we don’t have the answer. We’ve been burning the midnight oil with many projects of late (Blue Room recordings, DVD project with associated video shoots, audio and video mixing, publicity material design, etc), and have been researching all manner of shiny new tech toys – but we still found time to squeeze in some in-depth examination of the whole online thing.

We decided that sometime soon we ought to screen out the scattergun approach (it’s counter productive and saps too much time and energy), we should focus more and zoom in on what’s important… and that’s what we plan on doing. Watch this space (not MySpace or some-other-next-best-thing space) for developments – hopefully it will pan out well, a lot of what went before will end up on the cutting room floor.

Are we ‘On The The Threshold Of A Dream’ or still ‘In Search Of The Lost Chord’ ???

Our next few scheduled appearances are shown below... details of these, and later gigs, are on our Gig List page. Additionally, we regularly pop in to residents nights and singarounds to do the occasional floor spot.